Wednesday, 10 April 2013

The 15 Minute Rush - Making Profits From Server Shutdown

The Intro

Just tonight, the servers went down which gave me a good idea for a quick write up, which was the 15 min bid war every time servers go down. It gives me a great feeling/rush to know that i got the last bid on something and can/will make profit on it when i log in.

For me servers go down Tuesday night, come up Wednesday morning, so its a good time to start bidding.

The method

The basics of this is, the moment the 15 min warning comes up(or maybe at the 10 min warning for less wasted time), you run the AH and look out for items that could be bid on that will make profit from either reselling ,vendor or if you are good enough you can calculate profits of what you can make with the item I.e vendor a crafted item for more profit or crafting an item to sell you could in theory also DE the items for dust.

The Addons

This can be done quicker with addons, but most addons don't have an up to date scan of the AH at the time that it goes down. So i prefer to do this manually also, it gives me a better feeling of winning an item.

There are some addons that are a must have when doing this, well more like. Any addon that can provide a vendor amount on the tool tip will suffice, I.E Auctionator and TradeSkillMaster.

The execution

Rarity settings: This setting helps alot when deciding between junk or treasure, most grey items are worthless so you don't wanna be buying those unless for vendor, but if you have low gold supplies bidding on low profit items isn't recommended if your money can be tied up somewhere else. A general good idea is to just search for white items(common) or higher.

Specific areas: These are specific areas that you are looking for, Normally i would search into these and check the items in there before doing a full view of the AH. But generally i just search the whole AH and go through one by one.

Click search: Pretty self explanatory.

Sort by: Generally if you are bidding on items, you want the lowest bid to be displayed first, so clicking on this little, thing? not sure what to call it, Header bar or what ever. until the items on the AH are going from lowest bid to highest bid.

Generally i will search through the ah for 15 mins. Get outbid switch over the bids page and rebid if worth it(This is where it gets exciting). While searching through the AH i will generally mouse over items on the right so i get there tool tip and scroll mouse wheel while looking at both bid price and vendor price and thinking in my head what i can resell it for or do with it.

Look out for the tricky items that have a low bid, but normal Buy price, those are good items to buy for resale.

And hopefully by the end of the 15 mins, you have had a mad rush of bidding/getting outbid and your bids page will look like this

And in the morning your mailbox will look like this:

Not as many was won as i would like, alot of outbids and some still ending.

The Conclusion

In the end, the profits were good, but i could have done better and looked for items only ending soon(inb4 i write an addon to do this). that way the profit right now would be bigger

The abyss crystal i shattered into 9 infinite dust,Which gave a good profit.

I DE'd the vest, and marked everything at there min buyout right now if its lower then market.